Will Ascenzo
Will is the lead blogger, copywriter, and copy editor for Gillware Data Recovery and Digital Forensics, and a staunch advocate against the abuse of innocent semicolons.
Dropped External Drive Data Recovery: Life in the Slow Lane
Hard drives were not designed to endure massive impacts while running. This is common knowledge now, especially with the advent of portable external hard drives that can easily tumble off a user’s desk. When our data recovery engineers perform dropped…
Western Digital AAKX Fails After Power Outage
Summer brings us the joys of long days, warm weather, and perfect opportunities to go to the beach. But it also brings us oppressive heat, humidity, and thunderstorms. Lightning strikes occur more frequently in the spring and summer than in…
MacBook Pro: Gray Screen of Death
In this Macbook Pro data recovery case study, the client turned on their laptop one morning and the dreaded “Gray Screen of Death” popped up. This gray screen, which Apple users may be familiar with, signifies a boot error. It’s common…
PGP Encrypted Laptop Not Booting
In this PGP encrypted hard drive recovery case study, the client had used full-drive encryption to secure the data on their laptop. With Symantec PGP whole disk encryption, the entirety of their hard drive was password-protected. PGP encryption, also known…
Seagate ST1000DM003 Not Spinning After Lightning Strike
During the summer, we here at Gillware see an uptick in hard drives that have stopped spinning. These hard drives come into our data recovery lab with shorted control boards. Thunderstorms happen a lot more frequently during the summer, and…
G-RAID Data Recovery Case Study: 8 TB RAID-0 External G-Technology Enclosure
In this case study, the client had been using a G-RAID enclosure as an external device for their Mac Pro. There were two four-terabyte Hitachi hard drives inside the enclosure. A RAID-0 array connected the two drives. The client used…
Flood Damaged Hard Drive Recovery Case Study: RAID-1 Mirrored Array
The client in this flood damaged hard drive recovery case sent us a two-drive RAID-1 array that had been submerged in floodwater during this year’s horrific flooding in Louisiana. RAID-1 is commonly used as a backup system, because both hard…
Water Damaged HDDs: Recovering Your Data After a Flood
Special thanks to Ron Dennison for providing his insights in hard drive failure analysis for both this blog post and our handling guide for water damaged HDDs. In our data recovery lab at Gillware, we’re no strangers to water damage. When we…
Synology RS3412xs Data Recovery Case Study: Deleted LUNs
In this data recovery case, the client had four deleted LUNs they needed recovered. These LUNs, or iSCSI targets, had lived on a Synology RackStation RS3412xs network-attached storage device. Synology RS3412xs Data Recovery Case Study: Deleted LUNs RAID level: 6 Total…